Blowgun of the Hero Twins

Hunahpu's shot at Seven Macaw

The Popol Vuh (K'iche' Maya, colonial alphabetic text from older oral and possibly hieroglyphic tradition): the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque shoot the arrogant bird-demon Seven Macaw with a blowgun; later they use cunning in the houses of Xibalba. The blowgun is a hunter's tool in the narrative, not a named relic with a genealogy of smiths. The manuscript is sixteenth-to-eighteenth century; the story is older. There is no archaeological "original blowgun of the twins." Precision and trick, not a glowing unique weapon, win the shots.